Intentionality is a big issue - yes sometimes a peripheral character’s role and impact can some what inadvertently become distorted in the telling of a story - but, in a significant historical recounting, to deliberately transform an individual from an obvious positive & supportive force - into an oppositional and obstructive negative factor … just to simplify the narrative - compromises the integrity of the story - and makes it more of a fictionalized “historical interpretation” - and in this case in particular, does a disservice to the true complexity and gravity of the subject.
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What crap.
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I haven’t seen Selma yet, and so have no particular comment on its portrayal of Johnson.
But I do have a couple of comments on this controversy:
But I am a history buff (I got a degree in history, in addition to my technical degrees, simply because I love the subject), and also a movie buff, and have found that the category of historical movies that are scrupulously accurate in their presentation of historical facts is an empty set, or nearly so.
In fact no historical movie that is completely accurate comes to mind, from the hundreds and hundreds that I have seen (but I would be pleased if someone can cite one to jog my recollections). Historical license is a given in this field of endeavor.
So I suggest we should resist applying a double standard to this movie, that we do not apply to all other historical films.
Second: The source of this controversy appears to be Joseph Califano. This does not seem to have been an issue until he made a public set-to about it. Califano is a man who seems frozen in the 1970s - committed to refighting old battles. His most notable role since leaving public office is in waging a severely fact-challenged drug war outfit called CASA which finds no ancient argument too hackneyed to deploy against the frightening scourge of cannabis. His opinion pieces on this are notable for their exclusive use of his own earlier op ed pieces as “evidence”. A man whose opinions were more carefully based on facts would have been a better source of a critique.
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Similarly, the author distorts the record of civil rights movies. No doubt he “was right to do so”. There are quite a few out there that are told from the black perspective, if you look around a little. Very white to ignore Spike Lee’s body of work, in particular. And Jackie Robinson, and Mohammad Ali.
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You’re exactly right. As if there were not drama enough in an accurate portrayal - both in Alabama and in DC. How on Earth will it help for young people to walk around with the notion that President Johnson was an enemy of black interests? It just contributes to the fact-averse, us-against-them spirit that plagues us. Whatever happened to truth setting us free?
I found this guy’s argument soft-headed in the extreme. Of course, he’s not a historian.
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The truly major problem with this kind of needless historical discrepancy is that it provides a wedge to cast doubt on other, undeniable facts. The historians who rightly describe it will have their words used as an excuse to deny the true and ugly facts.
It is needless because someone on the creative end decided that they had to heighten the drama–but a truly able artist can create drama without such cheap devices.
And the list of films about the struggle–all seemingly white-centric, to coin an awful word–is pretty thin. Jeffrey Wright’s portrayal of MLK in Clark Johnson’s “Boycott” is as good as his reputation promises. More than 20 years ago the family drama “I’ll Fly Away” ran for two seasons on broadcast TV. Set at the dawn of the Civil Rights era, it showed ordinary people coming together to create a movement, as the southern whites stood by, looking on at best in bemusement, at worst in murderous reaction.
And then there’s The Intruder.
If it looks raw, it is raw. They had to keep moving from small town to small town, as the locals got wind of what they were doing. The young man leading the integration of his high school had done the same thing in actuality a year before.
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If it weren’t bad enough that they altered truth to shoehorn it into a movie narrative, they turned LBJ into such an intellectually lazy 2 dimensional B-movie Hollywood caricature. It cheapened the film, and did a great disservice to the audience and LBJ’s role in Civil Rights. For the life of me, I don’t know why this choice was made by the director. Surely, MLK’s undeniable importance and remarkable achievements didn’t need fictional embellishing at the expense of others.
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Thanks for the comments, all.
To those arguing for what “the history” actually includes or reflects or the like, I would simply ask from where we get that sense of “the history” (as related to Johnson). Virtually all of it, to date, has come from sources focused in one way or another on Johnson’s own perspective, actions, attitudes–all of which, again, is necessarily distorted toward him and away from other actors and events, and their perspectives. Even the much-discussed tapes focus only on Johnson and King when they were in conversation with one another–not, for example, King and all his compatriots the rest of the time, and how they perceived and engaged with Johnson. This film is firmly focused on portraying the latter, among many other goals.
To the commenter who mentioned Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, I agree that I left that film out, and that’s a simple oversight and I apologize. Certainly one that could be paired with this film productively. Robinson and Ali are stories that, while parallel to Civil Rights in many ways, are not nearly as much about the movement or its moment, so I would separate them. But Lee’s film, yes, most definitely.
Thanks,
Ben
If you don’t like Joe Califano, how about Bill Moyers. Here is a brief excerpt of his comments on Selma: http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/15/bill-moyers-selma-lbj/
To my knowledge he never suggested Selma as the venue for a march but he’s on record as urging King to do something to arouse the sleeping white conscience, and when violence met the marchers on that bridge, he knew the moment had come: He told me to alert the speechwriters to get ready and within days he made his own famous “We Shall Overcome” address that transformed the political environment. Here the film is very disappointing. The director has a limpid president speaking in the Senate chamber to a normal number of senators as if it were a “ho hum” event. In fact, he made that speech where State of the Union addresses are delivered – in a packed House of Representatives. I was standing very near him, off to his right, and he was more emotionally and bodily into that speech than I had seen him in months. The nation was electrified. Watching on television, Martin Luther King Jr. wept. This is the moment when the film blows the possibility for true drama — of history happening right before our eyes.
He also addressed the sex tape, and other parts that he considers deliberate distortions of truth.
Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I do know that many people who see a movie based on real people will believe the central tenet of it. It seems a shame to let untold numbers of young people come away with a completely incorrect opinion of what LBJ did. How many of them will read scholarly tomes that explain what really happened? He had plenty of flaws, but betraying MLK evidently was not one of them.
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LBJ’s role wasn’t a central tenet of this movie. It was a bit part.
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With all due respect, Mr. Railton is an idiot. He forgets one difference between those of us who consider ourselves progressives and the Fox news mentality–we deal in facts, i.e., truth; they deal in preferred fantasy. One other difference: the Fox people rarely shoot those on their side; Railton apparently prefers to stab his allies in the back. I suppose its easier.
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The mistake in giving “balanced” distortions is to assume that people will take both sides and balance them out. But what we see in reality is that people will generally accept as gospel whichever side best fits with what they expect to see, while ignoring the other side entirely. So people watch Fox News or read their far-left blogs as “balance” against what the MSM says, but really just ignore anything that goes against what they want to hear. People don’t want to do the work of figuring out how things really are. They want The Truth handed to them, and they’d like it to be as easy to understand as possible.
And so that’s why it’s so dangerous to distort things for balance, because people will accept it as literal truth while rejecting the other side entirely. So you’re not really balancing anything. Instead, you’re creating parallel realities that are so far off that you can’t even debate against the other side, since there’s no common ground and both sides assume they have The Truth. And that just makes sense. I don’t watch Fox News to balance what I read at TPM. I read TPM so I know what lies Fox News is saying. But if I learned that TPM was lying to me, I’d leave, since I want truth, not feel good distortions to balance out Fox.
And so it’s just best to be as truthful as possible, because people will accept whatever you give as gospel, while the other side will use your distortions as proof that you’re not credible. And instead of balancing anything, you’ve just made a bigger mess.
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Motion pictures are motion pictures. History is history. The two rarely ever, if ever meet. I don’t like watching a movie about a historical act that I experienced first hand. All I ever notice is the errors in them. A big problem with such movies is that they gradually move the perception of what actually happened far away from what really happened. There are a very large number of us who remember the events in Dr. King’s life. For us, our mind is the history, not the movie.
“King and all his compatriots the rest of the time, and how they perceived and engaged with Johnson. This film is firmly focused on portraying the latter, among many other goals.”
So, does the film accurately portray how they saw him? Or was it mainly using him as a surrogate villain for dramatic purposes?
This is why I hate movies “based on true events,” since the ultimate point of movies is to entertain and make money, and yet because film is such a powerful medium, it generally is accepted as more real than the history books or the experts.
I can’t even remember how many times I’ve debated against people who became “experts” on complicated subjects based on having seen a single documentary. And when they can’t defend anything they say, they just keep insisting I need to see the documentary and I’d get it, even on areas like economics and finance that I’ve taken enough classes on to realize I wasn’t an expert. Films are great at making people experts on superheroes and transforming robots. Anything more serious than that takes more than two hours.
I would argue it does accurately portray how many Civil Rights leaders and African Americans in the era saw Johnson, as I understand it from their own writings, letters, voices: at best reluctant and in need of serious pushing, at worst aligned with the FBI and its ilk (as I wrote above).
Even with the perspective very firmly on African American leaders and marchers, the film manages to portray multiple sides of Johnson, though–putting him on the spectrum that includes Hoover and George Wallace, but also includes the white participants in the march on the other end. He’s in the middle of that, more hostile at moments and more supportive at others. To be honest, I’d say it does more right by Johnson than many so-called Civil Rights films have done by African American characters.
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I just want to thank you for replying to the comments here. There are many who agree with you, and probably more who don’t, but it is rare that an author posts in response to our comments. I really appreciate your taking the time (and being brave – some comments can be pretty tough!) and it means a lot that you cared enough to read the comments, and also came back with your thoughts.
It is a refreshing attitude, and I have a great respect for you for doing this. Thank you.
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Thank you for this! It ain’t always easy, but the rewards outweigh the occasional pains for sure.
PS. I grew up in Charlottesville, and my Dad and Mom are still there. Actually wrote a blog post on race and Cville history at one point:
Thanks again,
Ben
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so much bullshit from people that haven’t even seen the movie
I saw Selma this weekend and am not sure what anyone means by “villainizing” LBJ. I think the movie did a fine job of presenting the kind of pressures and problems that government/liberals of the time had in supporting King. LBJ is presented as someone who cares, but has many other concerns which he must balance against outright support for King. LBJ could not have gotten the VRA passed without the courage and determination with which so many blacks faced brutality and death in the civil rights movement. This movie was not about LBJ, and made no claims to be about LBJ. I think much of the negative reaction to the film comes from white folks who are so used to the notion of “white savior” perspectives that this comes as a bit of a shock to them. I particularly loved the scenes such as the woman who kept trying to register to vote, that represented the quietly courageous actions of so many people who will never share the fame of LBJ or King, but without whom no progress in civil rights could have been made. Furthermore, in the argument of “true history” versus “distortion”, let’s remember that this was never billed as a documentary. I disagree with using the term “distortion” when it seems to portray a very real and “true” picture of how the civil rights movement felt to many of us - that there were tensions and pressures both within the movement itself and within the white liberal communities who wanted to support civil rights. As someone who came too late to march with Dr. King, but who participated in civil rights work in the 70’s and anti-apartheid work in the 80’s, frankly I tend to be skeptical of films like this - and I found this movie did not hit any of my “bullshit” buttons. It was moving, portraying all of the characters with depth and dignity. I did not come away from this movie thinking less of LBJ, or more of King, but rather feeling the bittersweet emotions and memories that come from having been just one of the faces in those marches, with all the passion and sense of both stumbling and triumph that came from that participation. I agree with BenRailton that it accurately portrays a perspective held by many.
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“I have to agree that it does distort history, making Johnson into more of a villain than seems justified by the historical record as it exists. And I believe doing so was a correct and necessary choice.”
This isn’t distorting history to make it fit into a more dramatic narrative, its distorting it to serve an explicit political objective.
This ultimately will not lead to a good place in human endeavors, no matter what your good intentions are in this particular case. Its a wrong and dangerous road to embark on.
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